The Republican Party’s presidential-nominating process has always been run by elites. Oh, the voters have their brief moments of triumph, hoisting up an unelectable right-winger (i.e., Pat Buchanan) or an uncontrollable moderate (John McCain, the circa-2000 version). But the establishment always wins. Meeting in their K Street offices and communicating through organs like George Will’s column and National Review, the main financers and organizers settle upon a useful frontman, a reliable vessel for the party’s agenda who — and this is the crucial part — is blessed with the requisite political talent. Democrats have been known to mess that last part up and nominate a dweeb, but Republicans have generally understood that an agenda tilted toward the desires of the powerful requires a skilled frontman who can pitch Middle America. Favorite character types include jocks, movie stars, folksy Texans and war heroes.

The hidden hand of the G.O.P. establishment is once again at work. Dissatisfied with a presidential field consisting of boring retreads (Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee) and Tea Party-endorsed outsiders (Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin), various elites have been trying to coalesce around a candidate of their own.

Now here is where the story gets strange. The candidates they are recruiting make Michael Dukakis look like John F. Kennedy. They are qualified enough to serve as president, but wildly unqualified to run for president. One way to put this is that most powerful people in the G.O.P. have suddenly gone idealistic. Another way to put it is that they’ve lost their minds.

No less than four Draft Candidate X movements appear to be under way. The most plausible of these is the Draft Mitch Daniels movement. Daniels, the governor of Indiana, has compiled an effective record as a budget-cutter, and his almost fanatical hatred for deficits tailors him well for the current party mood.

Daniels’s drawbacks begin — but by no means end — with his lack of height, hair and charisma. His informal draft committee has apparently convinced itself that, in some freakish inversion of the rules of politics, this counts as an advantage. “He seems to have sunk into a black hole of personal magnetism and come out the other side, where the very lack of charisma becomes charismatic,” wrote The Weekly Standard. “He is the un-Obama.” Expect to hear a lot more talk like this. Rather than fight an appealing communicator like Obama with a somewhat less appealing Republican communicator, the plan here is to make a lack of appeal a selling point in itself. Which explains why Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey reportedly tarred Obama as a “poser and a preener” at a big G.O.P. fund-raising event last month.

Problem is, electoral politics is a highly superficial field. A series of experiments has shown that subjects, even young children, can reliably pick the winners of races based solely on candidate photos. Now, most voters tend to support one party or the other no matter what. But swing voters tend to have the greatest susceptibility to the influence of superficialities. It’s therefore hard to imagine why party operatives might be pining to nominate a man who looks less like the popular conception of a president and more like the president’s accountant.

Yet another difficulty facing Daniels is that he was, indeed, the president’s accountant. As budget director, he helped draw up and publicly advocate George W. Bush’s fiscal policies from 2001 to 2003. It’s worth noting that even Republicans concede that Bush’s budget was a disaster. The party’s rebranding strategy revolves around convincing Americans that they have learned from Bush’s catastrophic budget policies. Who would be less ideally positioned to make this case than Bush’s budget director?

The answer to that question is Jeb Bush. Naturally, Republicans are courting the brother of the former president as well. Now, the ex-governor of Florida does have a great deal of natural political talent, but he suffers from an inherent branding challenge. Imagine ad firms trying to persuade consumers to give “Spoiled-Brand Milk” or “Kamikaze Airlines” a try. You would insist they just change the name, right? Bush can’t do that.

Then you have the campaign to draft Christie, who doesn’t cut a trim figure and who specializes in verbally abusing his constituents. He has managed to maintain approval ratings that hover around 50 percent because of some combination of the deeply discredited former governor he defeated, the haplessness of his opposition and his state’s unique tolerance for loud, compulsively rude men in positions of leadership.

And then, finally, there is Haley Barbour, the Mississippi governor. Barbour is somewhat slimmer and considerably nicer than Christie. A former tobacco lobbyist and occasional pre-civil-rights-era nostalgic, Barbour is the comic embodiment of his party’s most negative stereotypes. A Barbour nomination would be the rough equivalent of the Democrats’ nominating Howard Dean, if Dean also happened to be a draft-dodging transsexual owner of a vegan food co-op.

The impulse to envision one of these figures as a frontman represents a category error. These are the kind of people you want advising the president behind the scenes; these are not the people you put in front of the camera. The presidential candidate is the star of a television show about a tall, attractive person who can be seen donning hard hats, nodding at the advice of military commanders and gazing off into the future.

What, then, explains the Republican establishment’s outburst of idealism/madness? For one thing, the legacy of Ronald Reagan caused conservatives to commit to a hyperidealized conception of the presidency. Democrats dismissed his popularity as a function of Hollywood charisma. Republicans bitterly contested this, and still do. “Far from the stereotype of the passive actor being fed his lines by myriad scriptwriters and directors, Reagan was an avid reader of conservative periodicals like Human Events and National Review, as well as of leading theoreticians of the post-World War II conservative movement,” the former Reagan staff member Jeffrey Bell argued in February. An editor of a 2001 book, “Reagan, in His Own Hand,” said that the Gipper possessed “a formidable intellect, as a reader, a thinker, a strategist.” Their takeaway: Televised charisma alone doesn’t win elections. Ideas — conservative ideas — win elections.

Second, the Bush disaster both highlighted the downside of nominating a frontman and led conservatives to embrace the conclusion that Bush failed primarily because he abandoned the true conservative creed after having been such an able spokesman for it in the 2000 campaign. The obvious solution, they decided, was to find a genuine member of the conservative movement, even one with no charisma at all.

In an old “Simpsons” episode, the unlikable brainiac Artie Ziff is elected prom king. “Instead of voting for some athletic hero or a pretty boy, you have elected me, your intellectual superior, as your king,” he says. “Good for you!” It’s funny because it hardly ever happens in real life.

A version of this article appears in print on April 10, 2011, on page MM11 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The G.O.P.’s Dukakis Problem. Today's Paper|Subscribe